The war for which .NET language will reign supreme just got a little dicier folks. For a while now everybody has been slowly moving toward C# as the defacto .NET language of choice. Big names in the .NET world have been showing off coding samples in C# for a long time, books have been filled with C#-only samples...it seemed that we were all moving toward a new future where semi-colons and curly-brackets would reign supreme.

That was...until now.

The VB.NET team has launched a new weapon in its quest for language domination: Beth Massi.

For those of you not in the know, Beth Massi is a legend in the world of Fox Pro, a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP, and a Senior Systems Architect with a health care product company.* She also has incredible powers...kinda like on Heroes, but in this case its the ability to draw large crowds of geeks to sessions at conventions and speaking engagements.

Take Dev Teach 2006, where what was dubbed as the "Massi-Effect" was first witnessed on Canadian soil. In an unprecendented show of force and geek-power, Beth's first presentation on Datasources and Databinding entered the Guiness Book of World Records as "Presentation Drawing the Biggest Crowd to Violate Fire Safety Laws in Mariott Chateau Champlain History". John Bristowe was relegated to showing off his "Introduction to VB.NET 2.0" presentation to his parents (who oddly enough attend every presentation John does), and Derek Hatchard was forced to feign sickness instead of having his talk foiled.

(Note: For those attending Dev Teach 2007, realize that this has not been forgotten. Word has it that Rob Windsor has hired Cirque du Soleil to perform an interpretive dance to go along with his Generics talk***, while Jeremy Miller is planning on giving away a new Chevy El Dorado at each of his sessions****...oh boys, how futile indeed...).

Now you might be thinking that I'm suggesting that having Beth on the VS Core Community Team will drive people to VB.NET simply because:

a) She's a ladyb) She works at Microsoftc) She modifies cars**d) She's not a guy

But no...its Beth's technical knowledge and experience coupled with her devotion to the developer community that will point those lost souls back towards the VB light. We, the VB majority (yes, take the VB 6.0 coders that are now using VB.NET and they still outnumber the C#ers out there), are very lucky to have her representing us and having her help spread the word that VB.NET is NOT a second-class language.

As Razor Ramone would say "Chalk one up for the good guys".

D

*This information is all publically available on her website. No stalking was involved in this blog post.

**Same as above

***That's the rumor...please don't spam me with flames about how instead of Cirque du Soleil he just hired Donald Belcham to dance around in a unitard

****El Dorado availability is determined by whether they can find pick up trucks anywhere east of Alberta. For those Albertans attending, no gunracks are provided with the El Dorado's.

Feedback

Your post left out one important thing: the fact that Donald and you have a MASSIve crush on someone in your post (and I'm not talking about Rob Windsor, either, although I'm sure he's up there with both of you).

But this foray into excellence was exacerbated by a reference to none other than Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrazor...RAMONE!!! Every post is a great one when Razor is involved. Where are the pics of Razor and Beth???5/2/2007 4:37 AM | Justice~!

ROFL! Great post! I'm excited to be coming back to DevTeach this year. I'm still on the slate to do the Datasources and Databinding talk this year but -- late breaking news -- I'll be switching with Berry Gervin taking over "The Future of VB" session. If you want to see all the cool language innovations coming soon in VB 9 plus a look into Silverlight and VB 10 then this will be the session for you. Maybe I should tell Brian to hire some jugglers... ;-)
5/6/2007 3:38 AM | Beth